The traditional organization of vending machines within a large vending and/or remote point of sale network utilizes the concept of a “route” of machines. Each route is a grouping of machines by geographic proximity, customer and/or client association, or other grouping method. These routes are then managed on a day-to-day basis by one or more route drivers who have the responsibility for maintaining the stock inventory within these machines as well as to collect the cash sales receipts from each. The fact that these machines typically contain several days' worth of inventory drives several aspects of traditional route creation and management strategy. Simply put, the number of machines per location and inventory on hand must be defined such that each machine within the route does not need service each day. Instead, the route is made up of a large number of machines, many more than can be visited in a single day, and the route manager selects the machines to visit each day. This also implies that that the route manager makes a decision as to the machines that are “safe” to skip for that day and may be visited in the future without sold-out or other revenue affecting issues. This skip vs. visit ratio can be as high as 12 or 15 to 1.